Electrical powered artificial lighting has become ubiquitous in modern society. Electrical lighting devices are commonly used, for example, in homes, hospitals, buildings of commercial and other enterprise establishments, as well as in various outdoor settings. Traditional light fixtures or luminaires have tended to be relatively dumb, in that they are turned ON and OFF, and in some cases dimmed, usually in response to user activation of a relatively simple input device.
Since the advent of electronic light emitters, such as lighting emitting diodes (LEDs), for general lighting type illumination application, lighting equipment has become increasingly intelligent with incorporation of sensors, programmed controller and network communication capabilities. Automated control, particularly for enterprise installations, may respond to a variety of sensed conditions, such as daylight or ambient light level and occupancy. The controllers for existing systems have fixed interfaces or limited configurability that forces users and designers of the systems to have to choose sub-optimal solutions for lighting systems operations. The limited configurability of controllers drives up costs and is inconvenient if the user needs to make a subsequent change after the initial design, which would increase cost to order additional hardware and cause down time while waiting for delivery of the newly configured component and its installation.
A need exists for providing an improved interface module for controllers in lighting systems.